Conscription (also known as "The Draft", the "Call-up" or "National service") is a general term for involuntary labor demanded by an established authority. It is most often used in the specific sense of government policies that require citizens to serve in the armed forces. It is known by various names — for example, the most recent conscription program in the United States was known colloquially as "the draft". Many nations do not maintain conscription forces, instead relying on a volunteer or professional military most of the time, although many of these countries still reserve the possibility of conscription for wartime and during times of crises.
Referring to compulsory service in the armed forces, the term "conscription" has two main meanings:
- compulsory service, usually of young men of a given age, e.g., 17 – 18, for a set period of time, commonly one-to-two years. In the United Kingdom and Singapore this was commonly known as "national service"; in New Zealand, at first compulsory military training and later national service; in Norway, Safeguard Duty/1st time service.
- compulsory service, for an indefinite period of time, in the context of a widespread mobilisation of forces for fighting war, including on the home territory, usually imposed on men in a much wider age group (e.g., 18 – 55). (In the United Kingdom this was commonly known as "call-up").
The term "conscription" refers only to the mandatory service; thus, those undergoing conscription are known as "conscripts" or "selectee" in the United States (from the Selective Service System or the Selective Service Initiative announced in 2004).
In the U.S. the term "enlisted" is often used to refer only to those who have volunteered for service in roles other than as commissioned officers.
Conscription History
Ilkum:
Around the reign of Hammurabi the Babylonian Empire was using a system of conscription called Ilkum. Under the system those eligible were
required to serve in the royal army in time of war. [1] During times of peace they were instead required to provide labour for other
activities of the state. [1] In return for this service those subject to it gained the right to hold land. It possible that this right was
not to hold land per se but specific land supplied by the state.[1]
Various forms of avoiding military service are recorded. While it was outlawed by the Code of Hammurabi the hireing of substitutes
appears to have been practice both before and after the creation of the code.[2] Later records show that Ilkum commitments could become
regularly traded. In other places people simply left their towns to avoid their Ilkum service. Another option was to sell Ilkum lands
and the commitments along with them. With the exception of a few exempted classes this was forbidden by the Code of Hammurabi.
Feudal levies:
Under the system of feudalism in the medieval period, most peasants and freemen were expected to provide one man of suitable age per family for military duty when requested by either the king or the local lord. The men sequestered in this way were called levies and fought as infantry. This was essentially an early form of conscription, and those that refused became outlaws. Although the exact laws varied greatly depending on the country and the period, generally these levies were only obliged to fight for one to three months.
Military slavery:
The system of military slaves was widely used by Turks in the Middle East from the 9th until the 19th century.
In the middle of the 14th century, Ottoman Sultan Murad I built his own personal slave army called the Kapikulu. The new force was built by
kidnapping large numbers of children, especially from Europeans during large raids or as a form of tribute known as the devsirme (translated
"blood tax" or "child collection"). The captive children, far from their families and cultures, were persuaded to convert to Islam.
Believing in the superior native talent of European — especially northern European — nationalities, the Sultans put the young boys,
into various levels of stress, endurance, and fighting levels over several years. Those that showed special promise in fighting skills
were trained in advanced and arcane warrior skills, put into the sultan's personal service, and turned into the ultimate fighting weapons
known as the Janissaries, the most famous branch of the Kapikulu. This soldier class became a decisive factor in the Ottoman invasions of Europe.
Most of the military commanders of the Ottoman forces, imperial administrators and de facto rulers of the Ottoman Empire,
such as Pargali Ibrahim Pasha and Sokollu Mehmet Pasa, were recruited in this way. By 1609 the Sultan's Kapikulu forces
increased to about 100,000. As European Christian states increased in military power, they were able to stem and eventually
repel most of the Islamic riazzas into the European heartland. Additionally, the raise in awareness by the common European to
their national and religious identity through greater literacy and education also made it increasingly problematic for Turkish
indoctrination to work effectively on the kidnapped children. The Sultan increasingly began turning to the Barbary Pirates whose
depredations continued upon white travelers, thereby providing a continued supply of captured children for the Sultan's human slave system.
Eventually the Sultan had to turn to foreign volunteers from the adept warrior clans of Circassians in southern Russia to
fill his Janissary armies. As a whole the system began to break down, and the loyalty of the Jannissaries became increasingly suspect.
Mahmud II forcibly disbanded Janissary corps in 1826.
Similar to the Janissaries in origin and means of development and probably the basis of the Janissaries, were the Mamluks.
The Mamluks were also usually captured European or non-Muslim Iranian and Turkish children who had been kidnapped or bought
as slaves from the Barbary coasts. Similar to the Turks, the Egyptians indoctrinated the children into becoming fanatical Islamic
slave soldiers who served the Muslim caliphs and the Ayyubid sultans during the Middle Ages. The first mamluks served the Abbasid
caliphs in 9th century Baghdad. Over time they became a powerful military caste, and on more than one occasion they seized power for
themselves, for example, ruling Egypt from 1250-1517. From 1250 Egypt had been ruled by the Bahri dynasty of Kipchak origin.
Slaves from the Caucasus served in the army and formed an elite corp of troops eventually revolting in Egypt to form the Burgi dynasty.
Mamluks excellent fighting abilities, massed Islamic Jihadi armies, and overwhelming numbers succeeded in overcoming and
genociding the grossly outnumbered Christian European Crusader fortresses in the Holy Land. They were mainly responsible for
preventing the Mongol Ilkhanate of Persia and Iraq from entering Egypt.
On the western coast of Africa, Berber Muslims also attempted to put into practice the process of capturing non-Muslims and
brainwashing them into fanatical Muslims. In Morocco, the Berber looked south rather than north. The Moroccan Sultan Moulay
Ismail "the Bloodthirsty" (1672-1727) raised a corps of 150,000 black slaves, called his Black Guard, who coerced the country into submission.
Invention of modern conscription:
The Swedish allotment system of the 17th century predates most conscription policies. the official layout of the system differs from the French
and modern but the effect was the same but on a lesser scale Modern conscription, the massed military enlistment of national citizens
(today recognized as "the draft"), was devised during the French Revolution, allowing the Republic to defend itself from the attacks
of European monarchies. Deputy Jean-Baptiste Jourdan gave its name to the September 5, 1798 Act, whose first article stated:
"Any Frenchman is a soldier and owes himself to the defense of the nation." It enabled the creation of the Grande Armée,
what Napoleon Bonaparte called "the nation in arms," which successfully battled European professional armies. More than 2.6 million
men were inducted into the French military in this way between the years 1800 and 1813.
The defeat of the disorganized Prussian Army shocked the Prussian establishment, which had largely felt invincible after the
Frederician victories. Scharnhorst advocated adopting the levée en masse, the military conscription used by France.
Krümpersystem was the beginning of short-term compulsory service in Prussia, as opposed to the long-term conscription previously used.
In Russian Empire, the service time was 25 years at the beginning of the 19th century. In 1834 it was decreased to 20 years.
The recruits should have been not younger than 17 and not older than 35.[13] In 1874 universal conscription on the modern pattern
was introduced, an innovation only made possible by the abolition of serfdom in 1861. New military law decreed that all
male Russian subjects, when they reached the age of 20, were eligible to serve in the military for six years.
Conscription was introduced in the Union Army during the American Civil War. The 1863 Enrollment Act permitted draftees
to hire paid substitutes to fight in their place. This, and the bounty system, led to widespread dislike of conscription
by the public at large; the New York Draft Riots were one symptom. In addition, draftees were viewed with disdain
by volunteer soldiers and their officers. In the end, the draft provided only 6% of the Union Army's manpower.
Conscription was not employed again in the U.S. until 1917.
Louis Althusser has also underlined how Machiavelli was one of the first modern theorists to think the relationship between
conscription and the creation of a nation, or successfully bolstering patriotism. Machiavelli despised the use of mercenaries
and professional armies, which at that time were ravaging the divided Italian states.
Sending conscripts to foreign wars that do not directly affect the home nation's security has historically been very
politically contentious in democracies. For instance, during World War I, bitter disputes broke out in Canada
(see Conscription Crisis of 1917), Australia and New Zealand (see Compulsory Military Training) over conscription.
Canada also had a political dispute over conscription during World War II (see Conscription Crisis of 1944).
Similarly, mass protests against conscription to fight the Vietnam War occurred in several countries in the late 1960s.
Currently, countries that draft women into military service are China, Cuba, Eritrea, Israel, Libya, Malaysia,
North Korea, Peru, and Taiwan.
In 2002, Sweden's government asked its army to consider mandatory military service for women. In the United Kingdom
during World War II, beginning in 1941, women were brought into the scope of conscription but, as all women with
dependent children were exempt and many women were informally left in occupations such as nursing or teaching, the number
conscripted was relatively few. In the USSR, though there was no systematic conscription of women for the armed forces,
the severe disruption of normal life and the high proportion of civilians brought brutally into contact with the fighting
that volunteers for volunteers for what was termed "The Great Patriotic War" found a ready response.
The United States came close to drafting women into the Nurse Corps in preparation for a planned invasion of Japan.
In 1981 in the United States, several men filed lawsuit in the case Rostker v. Goldberg, alleging that the Military
Selective Service Act violates the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment by requiring that men only and not also
women register with the SSS. The Supreme Court eventually upheld the Act, stating that "the argument for registering
women was based on considerations of equity, but Congress was entitled, in the exercise of its constitutional powers,
to focus on the question of military need, rather than 'equity.'"
On October 1, 1999 in the Taiwan Area, the Judicial Yuan of the Republic of China in its Interpretation 490 considered
that the physical differences between males and females and the derived role differentiation in their respective social
functions and lives would not make drafting males only violating the Constitution of the Republic of China. However,
transsexual persons are exempt from the Taiwanese conscription.
References
- Postgate, J.N. (1992). Early Mesopotamia Society and Economy at the Dawn of History. Routledge. p. 242 & p. 243. ISBN 0415110327.
- Janissary on Everything2.com
- Lewis. Race and Slavery in the Middle East
- The Turks: History and Culture
- In the Service of the State and Military Class
- Janissary corps, or Janizary, or Yeniçeri (Turkish military), Encyclopædia Britannica
- Janissaries
- The Mamluk (Slave) Dynasty (Timeline)
- Lewis. Race and Slavery in the Middle East. Oxford Univ Press 1994.
- Conscription
- Dierk Walter. Preussische Heeresreformen 1807-1870: Militärische Innovation und der Mythos der "Roonschen Reform". 2003, in Citino, p. 130
- Military service in Russia Empire
- Conscription and Resistance: The Historical Context
- Brig. Gen. John S. Brown (August 1, 2007) ([dead link] – Scholar search), The Draft, http://www.ausa.org/webpub/DeptArmyMagazine.nsf/byid/TWAH-759L7H?OpenDocument&Print=1, retrieved on 2007-01-15
- CBC News Indepth: International military
- The Economic Costs and the Political Allure of Conscription
- Roger Broad (2006), Conscription in Britain, 1939-1964: the militarisation of a generation, Taylor & Francis, p. 244, ISBN 9780714657011, http://books.google.com/books?id=NWAzKA6ihUEC.
Conscription into military service, Peace Pledge Union, http://www.ppu.org.uk/learn/infodocs/st_conscription_l.html.
- Jack Cassin-Scott; Angus McBride (1980), Women at war, 1939-45, Osprey Publishing, pp. 33-34, ISBN 9780850453492, http://books.google.com/books?id=gPUtcFooPNoC.
- Draft Women?, Time magazine, January 15, 1945, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,775362,00.html, retrieved on 2008-08-12
- The women's draft. An analysis of the controversy over the nurses' Selective Service Bill of 1945., PubMed, PMID: 4580476, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4580476, retrieved on 2008-08-12
- Rostker v. Goldberg, Cornell Law School, retrieved 26 December 2006.
- Judicial Yuan Interpretation 490 translated by Jiunn-rong Yeh
- (Chinese)Attachment of the standard of the class of physical condition of a draftee, Conscription Agency, Ministry of the Interior
- Wikipedia.org
